


once a day, every day

by silkspectred



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Angst, Avengers Vol. 8 (2018), Blood, Bodily Functions, Body Image, Depression, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Getting Back Together, Gore, Happy Ending, Healing, Hydra Steve Rogers, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Minor Character Death, Morally Ambiguous Character, Murder, POV Tony Stark, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Physical Abuse, Post-Secret Empire (Marvel), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 11:23:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15639738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkspectred/pseuds/silkspectred
Summary: Looking back on it, Tony tries to understand how he could have been possibly fooled.The man doesn’t smell like Steve. He doesn’t walk like Steve, doesn’t talk like Steve.He only looks like Steve, and yet everyone, including Tony, believed that he was Steve. For months.





	once a day, every day

**Author's Note:**

> Please read all the tags. The fic deals with some tough and potentially triggering themes in very explicit terms. Be careful. 
> 
> Someone dies a gruesome death in this story, but it’s neither Tony nor Steve. 
> 
> Thanks to [tones](https://twitter.com/ironmantrilogy) and [gem](https://twitter.com/infinityygem) for beta. Any remaining mistakes are for sure 100% mine.

The mattress squeaks under Tony with every thrust of the hips of the man on top of him. The rhythm is hypnotic and Tony focuses on that.

 _Squeak, squeak, squeak_. Not even a decent bed.

He’s mildly grateful for the noise. It’s not particularly loud, but Tony allows it to take over his mind, so he doesn’t have to hear the man’s grunts, or his moan when he comes. He hasn’t yet, but he will soon. He’s fucking Tony faster, which means he’s close.

Tony isn’t. He’s not even hard. He never is.

It doesn’t hurt, though. Not much, anyway. There’s that, at least. The man always brings lube with him, a good brand, and Tony doesn’t need a lot of preparation, especially after months of being fucked every night. But the man doesn’t always care about slicking himself up sufficiently, doesn’t care about making it good for Tony. He doesn’t care whether he hurts Tony or not; it’s just coincidental that most of the time Tony can tolerate it.

The man groans and comes. He tries to kiss Tony, he always does after he finishes, but Tony moves his head away and the man doesn’t try again. With all the things he’s taking, Tony wonders why he doesn’t just force him into the kiss.

“Join me,” the man says against the skin of Tony’s neck. “Lead Hydra with me.”

Tony stays perfectly still and doesn’t say anything.

He hasn’t said a single word since it started.

***

Looking back on it, Tony tries to understand how he could have been possibly fooled.

The man doesn’t smell like Steve. He doesn’t walk like Steve, doesn’t talk like Steve.

He only looks like Steve, and yet everyone, including Tony, believed that he _was_ Steve. For months.

Then Tony ended up in a coma. Then the man forced Tony awake, and Tony knew, immediately, that the person in front of him wasn’t Steve.

The man shouldn’t have woken Tony up. His body will shut down soon. There was something in progress that wasn’t allowed to run until complete, and nature—science—always asks for its price.

He wasn’t ready. Tony’s body wasn’t ready to be brought back to consciousness, and his body wasn’t ready for _this_. But no body is ever ready for this.

***

It occurs to Tony that his inaction, his passive acceptance of the events, isn’t like him. He knows he should fight, he should threaten, he should react. Try to escape, at least.

He’s Tony Stark. Escaping imprisonment defines his entire life.

But being so intimately acquainted with it means that Tony knows when there’s no escape. From here, there isn’t.

And everything, all the drive he could have, the instinct of self-preservation, the spark of fight in him, all of it has been washed away by a man who looks like the love of Tony’s life. That man, that bad copy of the best man Tony’s ever known, kidnapped Tony and fucked him against his will for three months and five days now.

That does something to a person. Even when that person is Tony.

He may not be entirely new to his consent not being respected. And he may not like himself; he may not think of himself as worthy of some friendships, of the esteem of his colleagues, of Steve’s regard. Of that love that was just blossoming between him and Steve before Tony fucked it all up with betrayal. Tony may despise himself, but he’s pretty sure that whatever he did, he didn’t deserve _this_.

But _this_ changed him. And Tony never even tried to fight. He didn’t give up after a while, he didn’t attempt to rebel in the beginning and then abandoned the idea when he saw how impossible it was to free himself. He simply never tried.

The first time the man brought him here, Tony thought he’d get beaten up, tortured, killed. That would have been okay. But the man, instead, forced Tony to walk to the bed and then ordered him to strip and lie down on his stomach.

Tony didn’t look. He only felt the blunt, wet tip of the man’s cock press into him, which he hadn’t been expecting at all, so he let out a small, terrified, “No, no,” before realizing that nothing he could ever say would change anything; that there was nothing he could possibly have to say here, to this man, to make him stop. So he never said anything else.

It’s not like him, not fighting back. But this, this… he can’t fight _this_.

***

After months of captivity, Tony tries, without much success, to gauge, in between all the things that are wrong with him, what’s a direct result of the man’s abuse and what’s a sign of his body going into failure because of the forcibly interrupted coma.

He has no idea about the state of his erections because he can’t get hard. Not here, not like this. Not with him.

The man is often rough with him, and not in the way Tony would normally enjoy. He’s violent, cruel. Selfish. Heartless.

Sometimes Tony bleeds from his ass. It burns, but it’s so constant that it’s hard to really notice anymore.

He’s covered in bruises. The man grabs his skin too hard, even though Tony never struggles. Maybe it’s that. Maybe the man wants him to struggle. Maybe he wants to make it as bad as possible for Tony until he snaps, yields, and joins him in his folly.

There are scratches on him, in the shape of the man’s fingernails. Some of them are infected; they’re red and swollen and warm to the touch. Tony picks at the scabs.

The man clutches him tight when he fucks him from behind, or while laying on their sides. One of Tony’s ribs is bruised. More likely broken. It’s not healing properly. It’s not healing at all—weeks have gone by and it still hurts like the first day. But it’s not just the man’s fault—sometimes, Tony twists and breathes in too deep on purpose, so the sharp jolt of pain fills his mind to the brim, and he can’t think about anything else. He can’t feel anything else.

Most days Tony doesn’t need to pee at all, and when he finally does, it’s orange and murky and it hurts.

His other bodily functions have been messed up as well, and Tony finds himself almost thankful for constipation. Digestion seems impossible.

The vomit is just the icing on the cake, really.

He has thrown up almost every day since the man imprisoned him. His throat isn’t faring so well, much less his teeth, and there are blisters on his tongue, coated with a disgusting white patina he can’t get rid of. The vomit is green and yellow and Tony stares into the toilet while he flushes it and wishes he could throw up his heart and die.

The man plays a game with him, almost every day—Tony can have food and water if he first drinks whatever alcoholic beverage is on the table. Tony never drinks it, no matter what it is, so he isn’t allowed a meal on most nights.

It’s a sick game, a show of power (as though daily sexual violence isn’t enough), but it was never meant to starve him. Still, Tony is all flesh and bones now.

Every night, after eating his dinner, the man comes inside Tony and leaves. Tony lies on the bed for a bit, shivering, then gets up and feels the man’s orgasm trickle out of him. He runs to the toilet and throws up, or at least coughs and retches his disgust into the metal bowl. Then, he washes himself with water marked as non-potable and tries not to look at the man’s come mixing up with his own blood on the skin of his inner thighs.

His lips are so chapped that they bleed. He looks at the red stain left on his pillow and he wonders if there’s anything else inside him, anything else except blood, vomit, shit, and piss.

He wonders if there ever was.

***

The first word he says after months of silence is Steve’s name. It’s Steve who breaks him out of his imprisonment, so it seems well-mannered to greet him in some way.

He doesn’t really say the word, though. He only mouths it, softly, and the effort to make his cracked lips form the ghost of a sound is a new torture on its own. He tastes blood, after.

He’s half-naked when Steve finds him, and that, of all things, annoys Tony. He doesn’t want to show his bruises, doesn’t want Steve to see how much weight he’s lost, how dry his skin is, peeling off and scabbing at his knees and elbows.

Steve takes out a glove and rests his hand over Tony’s shoulder blades. It’s warm and it feels big on Tony’s shriveled-up frame, on his paper-thin skin. But Tony lets himself be touched. He’s not scared. The other man, after all, wasn’t Steve.

Steve tries to hug him, relieved and sad, but Tony gasps in pain because of his broken rib and flinches away. He regrets it, because he doesn’t want Steve to think that he might be confused about who’s standing in front of him, and Tony would like to explain it to him, but he doesn’t know how. Words feel unfamiliar now, strangers. Foreign objects inside him that he’s forgotten how to push out.

Steve takes him to a hospital. It seems like a S.H.I.E.L.D. place, but they tell him S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t exist anymore. Tony spends three days there, being prodded and tested, then calls Steve and checks himself out.

Steve takes him home and Tony thanks him with a rough, scratchy voice, and he asks to be left alone. Steve says, “Okay, Tony. As you wish. I understand,” and he leaves, and Tony thinks that Steve doesn’t understand, not really, and he will have to explain it to him, eventually. But Tony, just then, loved Steve a bit more for saying what he said the way he said it.

Tony doesn’t look at himself in the mirror. He takes a quick shower, dresses, hops in his car and drives to a secret lab where he reboots his whole biology, effectively erasing every physical sign of what the man did to him.

It’s a painful procedure, but, well. He’s had much worse.

***

A few months pass and Tony has a new suit of armor. He’s part of a new team with an old name and they even get a new base in a mountain, of all things.

It feels new and old at the same time. He’s still doing what he’s done for most of his adult life, and yet something inside him has shifted, and he hates that. No one has the right to change someone else like that, the way Tony’s been changed. No one.

He never had to deal with the long-term physical consequences of what the man did to him, but there are others, less obvious ones. He doesn’t like to be naked for long stretches of time—he showers in record time and gets dressed while his skin is still damp. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t have a body at all. Sometimes he thinks that his body is just a sack full of vomit and the man’s come, and he should try to throw it all up. He should cut his stomach open and let it all bleed out until he feels clean and empty. Tony thinks these things, and then he comes back to his senses and tries to go on with his day.

He’s more subdued. He smiles less, talks less. He never laughs. He gets distracted while he’s working, and he startles back to full awareness to notice that two hours have passed while he was staring into nothing.

He’s angry. He snaps at people, even at Riri once, who really doesn’t deserve it. She gapes at him, and he bites his bottom lip and apologizes and she says that it’s okay. She squeezes his hand softly and says, “It’s okay, Tony.” He squeezes back and turns his face away, so she doesn’t see his eyes gleaming with shame.

He has intrusive self-destructive thoughts.

_What if I drank an entire bottle of whiskey._

_I should throw myself out of this window._

_What if I jammed this fork into my carotid._

_What if I crashed the jet, right now._

_Stick the screwdriver in your eye, Tony, do it._

The effort of swallowing down the urge brings tears to his eyes and vomit to his throat.

Loud noises scare him. He jumps in his seat whenever an open window makes a door slam by mistake. But it’s not a problem when he’s in the field. When he’s Iron Man, he’s free.

***

It’s good to have people around.

His teammates look at him with no pity, but only deep understanding and affection. He’s not the only one with something like this in his past. He wouldn't be even by raw statistics.

Still. No one asks, no one comments, no one hints, except for Stephen one night saying, hesitantly, “Would you like me to…” to which Tony replies with a calm, “No,” and that’s the end of it. But everyone knows.

Carol observes him with a careful, welcoming smile in her eyes. She’s warm and friendly, protective, like a sister. She offers to spar with him and he accepts, and pretending to fight instead of doing it for real, now, fixes whatever was left to fix between them. Tony smells her sweat on his skin right before entering the shower and he feels strangely strong.

T’Challa speaks to him in soft tones, scared that Tony might shatter if his voice is too loud. They talk about the team and then T’Challa gives him a book of poems he read when he was young. Tony thanks him and reads one poem every night, right before falling asleep. One of them is about what happened to Tony, and Tony doesn’t know if T’Challa gave him the book because he wanted him to read this particular poem, or if he didn’t even remember that it was there. There’s a bit that says,

_you think about what was done to you_

_once a day,_

_every day,_

_for the rest of your life_

and Tony thinks that he hasn’t lived for much time after it happened to him, but he’s sure it must be true. At first, the idea feels defeatist—it doesn’t matter what you do, how much you work to leave it in the past, the memory will hunt you down and find you and make itself manifest once a day every day, for the rest of your stupid life. But then, inexplicably and quite unexpectedly, the thought becomes warmly comforting. Now he has something he simply _can’t_ forget.

Jen brings him a bottle of water when he’s in the lab almost every night, and sometimes she sits at the next table with a case file Matt Murdock asked her to please look over because he’d really love to hear her opinion on it. Tony thinks it’s an excuse to keep an eye on him, but after a while, he’s not so sure anymore. Jen was recently in a coma too, after all (they could be coma buddies. Ha. Isn’t that funny?), so maybe she needs him to keep an eye on her, too, but didn’t know how to ask. Whatever the reason for her behavior, though, Tony cherishes her company.

Thor clasps his shoulder with his flesh hand and opens his mouth to say something, so Tony asks him about Jane Foster before he can talk. She’s responding well to treatment and Tony’s heart fills with joy at the news. Thor looks at him, then, and nods almost imperceptibly, and Tony thinks that he’s known Thor for longer than he’s known Steve, and isn’t that weird. He feels like there was never a time in his life when he didn’t know Steve.

Steve doesn’t talk to him. Except for Avengers-related business, Steve just avoids him.

Tony’s sure that in Steve’s mind, this is meant to give Tony space; make him adjust without forcing him to share the room with someone who looks like the man. It makes sense, but it’s not something Tony needs. The man and Steve couldn’t be more different for him.

It’s okay, Tony thinks. There’s no rush.

***

Tony enters the library of Avengers Mountain one night to find Steve there. Tony’s presence makes him ill at ease—he puts down his book and stands up, then realizes that there was no purpose for that, so he remains there, awkward in his embarrassment.

“Tony.”

Even his voice isn’t the same. How did they not realize. How did Tony not realize.

“Hi. Sorry to disturb you,” Tony says politely. “I’ll be just a moment. I just need…” Tony reaches for the top shelf and takes _Ivanhoe_. It’s not the original copy from his childhood; it was destroyed in one of the many attacks to Avengers Mansion. But he bought another. It’s old and beautiful, and he paid a lot of money for it. It has a red leather cover, and the title written in gold letters. Just the way you’d imagine a book about knights would look.

He smiles at Steve.

“Goodnight,” he says, friendly and somewhat cheerful.

“Tony,” Steve repeats, but he doesn’t seem to have anything else to say after that. He sighs—lets his chest rise and fall with it, lets his misery draw a shadow on his face. He looks at the floor and doesn’t notice Tony walking towards him until he hears him rest the book on top of the coffee table.

He lifts his head to look at Tony, his eyes widening—he’s surprised by the sudden proximity.

Tony touches him. He feels the anticipation run over Steve’s skin, his fear that the touch will be unwelcome to Tony even though it’s Tony who is initiating it.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” Tony says, and smiles as true as he can, because he really is happy that Steve is here, he’s so, so happy, and he wants Steve to know it.

Steve slides his hands past Tony’s shoulders, and places them on his back, folding him into a tentative hug that grows more confident by the second.

Tony isn’t sure if Steve kissed his hair on not, just now, but it felt like he did.

His heart is beating really fast. Tony can hear it, with his head bent to rest over Steve’s collarbone. He feels his own heart rate speed up, and he imagines his heart beating against Steve’s; the two pushing at each other in a bizarre dance of blood and muscles.

“You’re so different,” Tony says, whispering now, knowing that Steve can hear him perfectly well.

For a moment nothing happens, and Tony doubts that what he said is enough to explain anything, especially after speaking about something else entirely only a minute ago. But Steve hugs him tighter, moves one hand from Tony’s ribs to the back of his head, and mumbles something Tony doesn’t get, so maybe it’s okay.

They stay like that for almost an hour, and then they hear someone walk past in the hallway, so they separate, smile, and wish each other a good night.

***

Most nights, Tony has trouble falling asleep. When he does, he has nightmares and he wakes up drenched in sweat, and he needs to wash his face and change his t-shirt, but first of all he needs to wait for his hands to stop shaking.

He doesn’t really remember his nightmares, which is good, he supposes. He knows they’re about the man and what he did to him, because they leave him feeling furious and terrified, but sometimes… sometimes he bolts awake and he feels happy. He doesn’t know why—and goddammit why can’t he just remember the dream—but each time it happens he can fall back asleep in no time, and that must be some kind of blessing.

***

The reboot gave him back his old body, so Tony doesn’t need to gain any lost weight, but he eats, regularly, and in the right quantities, and he drinks plenty of water.

He surprises himself thinking that he likes the way his body looks now. He’s lean and sinewy, slender. He used to be bulkier a few years ago, but he prefers himself this way. Maybe it’s because this means that there’s less of him, but he wants to think that it’s because he looks more like he did when he was young, when he first became Iron Man.

He exercises when he can, and he eats. He doesn’t feel very hungry when it’s time for dinner, but he always eats, especially when the team is together.

Steve sets the table for everyone and places his napkin, with the blue ring, next to Tony’s golden one.

***

Something grows again between them. Tony recognizes it. They settle back into the well-oiled mechanisms of their friendship; they spend more time together outside of team business and Steve relaxes in his presence, lets go, somehow, of his shame.

One afternoon, just after lunch, Tony comes back to Avengers Mountain from a meeting in the city. A bit of a headache is blooming between his eyes, so he takes off his jacket and tie, unbuttons his collar, rolls up his sleeves, and splashes his face with cold water.

“Come in!” he says in response to the knocking on his door. It’s Steve.

When he sees Tony, his pupils dilate, and his gaze travels from Tony’s shoulders to his narrow hips, to his naked forearms, and then up again to the exposed hollow of his throat.

He blinks. “Oh, that’s… that’s a nice shirt,” he mutters, evidently regretting every word as soon as it exits his mouth, or maybe wishing they came to him smoother, more naturally than this. He looks down, at the carpet covering the floor of Tony’s room, then he lifts his head to give Tony a timid smile in lieu of an apology.

Tony thinks that Steve doesn’t have anything to be sorry about. He just tried to pay him a compliment, that’s all. To be honest, it felt nice to be looked at with appreciation. That’s why he says, “Thanks.”

Steve waits for the worst of the awkwardness to pass. “Sam, uh… he gave me a chess set for my birthday. I was wondering if you wanted, uh… we, we could—”

Tony takes one of Steve’s hands between his. Steve stiffens, but doesn’t pull away.

“How very Spock and Kirk of us,” Tony jokes, and Steve tries to smile a strained smile.

“Just let me rest for half an hour or so,” Tony says, trying now for a gentler approach, and feeling like he’s telling Steve a secret. “I’ll come find you in the library.”

“Okay,” Steve says, the word catching in his throat while he stares into Tony’s eyes. He brings their joined hands up to his face and kisses Tony’s forefinger, just above the nail.

He blushes, and then leaves.

***

It soon becomes clear to Tony that he has to be the one to make the real first move with Steve. Steve won’t go further, no matter how much Tony implicitly encourages him to.

Tony’s tried basically anything that could work with him. He’s leaned onto Steve’s shoulder while they were watching a movie with the others, has hugged him every chance he got, has whispered in his ear when there was no real reason for it, and he’s even flirted across the team comms and made Jen groan and T’Challa go, “Ew.” But every time Tony tries to push at the edges of friendship and imply something different, Steve instantly draws back, or puts space between his body and Tony’s, or makes up an excuse to leave the room, or fails to respond to Tony’s jokes.

Nothing works with Steve. He can’t be nudged into it, because it has to be Tony to take that step. And Tony gets it, really, he does. It can’t be Steve. As much as they’re trying to let the past go, what the man did to Tony casts a long shadow on their present.

He entertains the idea that maybe Steve doesn’t really want him, that there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. But it can’t be—he recognizes all the signs. They did this dance once already; Tony knows what the twinkle in Steve’s eyes means, what’s hidden in the softness of his smile. He knows how Steve looks when he thinks about kissing him.

He knocks on Steve’s door in the middle of the night. Steve wakes up, and Tony stands there, on the threshold, his body slicing the light coming from the hallway.

Tony knows what he wants to say.

“Nhhmmm?” Steve grumbles, and Tony suddenly wants to say, _Wake up, old man._ But he doesn’t. _I’m sorry_ , he wants to say. _I know it’s late_. And he imagines Steve saying… he remembers Steve saying, _It’s fine, Tony. I’m grateful_.

His stomach lurches. He can’t do it anymore. Not now, not after thinking about that.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks. “Did something happen?”

Ah, yes. Steve, always the Avenger.

“Did I tell you that I’ve found my biological mother?”

“Uh… no. I mean, I know you did, but I don’t think you shared any details.”

“Do you want to—”

“Yes. Of course.” Steve puts on a t-shirt and rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

 _Come on_ , Tony almost says. _I’ll buy you a coffee_.

But he doesn’t say it.

***

After that, he decides not to plan it. He plans not to plan it.

One night, a few weeks later, he showers and changes into comfortable clothes that he’ll probably end up wearing to bed. He takes a laptop from the lab and a few notes he’s scribbled on loose sheets of paper.

Steve is sitting on one of the couches in the library. It’s not late, but the sky is already completely dark, and Steve has the lamp on. Light and shadow chase each other over his face and make him look like a chiaroscuro study. He’s reading something, a novel. He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a white t-shirt. Tony looks at himself, and the only thing that’s different is that his t-shirt is black.

Steve tears his gaze away from his book when Tony enters the room. He smiles.

“Hey,” he says. “You should get a notebook,” he adds, and Tony notices that a couple of his papers fell to the ground. He crouches down to pick them up.

He sits on the couch, next to Steve.

“Mind if I sit here?” he remembers to ask when he’s already sitting.

Steve’s lips curl with amusement. “Of course not.”

Tony works for a while. Steve reads. The room is silent. There’s only them breathing, Steve turning the page. The clicking of Tony’s keyboard, him leafing through his notes.

“What are you writing?” Steve asks.

“A paper,” Tony replies.

“About a new invention?”

“No. About something old that can be used in an unexpected new way,” Tony says. Steve licks his lips, smiles to himself, and resumes reading his book.

Another hour passes in silence.

Then Tony folds his notes, adjusts them over the laptop’s keyboard, and he closes the lid over them. He places the laptop on the coffee table.

He turns to look at Steve, who looks back, curious and a bit startled, his book still open as though he’s sure he’ll go back to reading it in a moment.

“You must know…” Tony sighs. “I’m sure you know.” He says it too seriously for the meaning to be mistaken, or not immediately understood.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he closes the book now, placing it next to Tony’s laptop. It’s _Dune_. A Ms. Marvel bookmark sticks out of it, and Tony wants to smile at that. He can’t wait to see the kid again and tell her that Captain America has her bookmark, and uses it to keep his place while reading one of her favorite books.

Steve sits back. He’s looking straight ahead now, not at Tony anymore. Tony has a bent knee on the seat of the couch, and his body is turned towards Steve, but Steve’s isn’t as welcoming.

“I know why every time I take a step towards you, you take a step back. Like just now.”

It’s not an accusation, but Steve must feel called out enough to relax his pose by a fraction.

“I don’t want to—”

“I know why you do it. No need to explain,” Tony says, and Steve sinks a bit more into the couch. “But I would like to try something, and I want you to know that I don’t think I can take your rejection right now. So, since I’m… since I feel even more strongly than usual about explicit consent, for some, uh, for some reason, I…” he can’t quite joke about it yet, okay, noted, “I want you to tell me if you don’t want it. Now. Before I do anything… anything unseemly, or, or, well. Untoward.”

Steve finally turns to stare at Tony’s face for a long moment, and Tony wants to fill the silence with something, but the intensity of Steve’s gaze makes the words melt on his lips.

“I do,” Steve says, quietly, as though he’s confessing a sin to a priest. “I do want it. You.”

Tony leans over and kisses him, just barely, on the mouth, his fingers gently holding Steve’s chin in place.

Everything is very still for a bit.

Then Steve kisses him back, grabs at his shoulders and his neck and his t-shirt, and Tony pushes on his feet to spin around and climb onto Steve’s lap and be kissed, kissed, and kissed some more by someone who doesn’t smell like the man, doesn’t move like the man, doesn’t talk like the man. By someone that merely, and only superficially, looks like the man.

They don’t go past kissing, that night. But Steve isn’t shy about caressing and touching him, or about leaving a trail of hickeys across his collarbones. Steve cups his ass with his hands and squeezes, and it feels so good to be touched with so much attention after so long, after, after—

They spend the night together in Tony’s bed. He rests his cheek against Steve’s rib cage, and lets his strong, regular heartbeat lull him to sleep.

***

The next day, Tony finds a beautiful notebook on his desk in the lab. It has a bright red leather cover and wonderfully thick pages, creamy-colored, blank.

On the very first page, Steve’s handwriting says, _With love, S_. There’s too much space between the L and the rest of the word _love_ , as though Steve stopped just right after he started writing it, unsure, all of a sudden, if he should use it or not. Obviously he must have decided to go for it, for whatever reason.

Tony laughs, alone in the lab.

***

They soon move on from kisses to what can be done with hands and mouths. Steve doesn’t even ask about anything else.

The man never wanted what can be done with hands and mouths, so Tony was never forced to do that. He just wanted to fuck Tony. But the man also wished to kiss him, and yet he never did, since Tony didn’t want it. There was a small amount of respect in that and Tony—

No, no. There was no respect. For the man, Tony was just a thing. A hole to be used and thrown away. Not a person. Not someone. A doll. A thing. A warm, hollow body to fill up with his violence. Something you—

But he respected Tony’s boundary around kissing, at least, that can’t be denied, he… he never forced Tony to kiss him and that has to… it has to count for something, right? Right?

No. No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. The man didn’t care. Anything he did or didn’t do was part of his sick power game, and there’s nothing deeper than that. Even asking Tony to join him as leader of Hydra was just to see if he could push Tony over that particular edge, if he could destroy him so completely, make him turn on his friends. He didn’t really want Tony by his side.

But sometimes Tony thinks that maybe the man…

Sometimes Tony tries to understand, to wrap his head around all that evil, and he can’t do anything but try to interpret the facts through his own values, that don’t have anything in common with the ones the man upheld. So it never adds up, and he needs to learn how to remember that.

Sex with Steve is different, of course. It’s the opposite, in fact. First of all, Tony wants it, very much so. But Steve is the real variable. He is attentive and generous; he’s a kind lover, and he takes just as much as he gives. He’s respectful but he doesn’t walk on eggshells around him—he often asks, “Is this okay?” and waits for Tony to nod, but his hands don’t tremble and his lips move sure and steady on Tony’s skin.

It’s good. It’s warm and electric and it makes Tony feel clean; it makes Tony want to stay naked while they do it, and for a little while after. Steve’s muscles are hot and solid under his, and Tony wants to kiss every inch of him.

He feels like he’d have no problem letting Steve fuck him, but when he tries to imagine it, the Steve in his mind morphs with someone who looks like him but isn’t him, and Tony allows himself a soft moan of terror.

But maybe it will be different if they actually do it, Tony muses, since in reality there would be other senses at play than just sight. He could feel the timbre of Steve’s voice while he murmurs sweet nothings in his ear, and Tony’s nostrils would fill with the scent of his skin. He could taste his saliva, the way it would mingle with his own on his tongue while they kiss, and Tony never let the man kiss him.

There would be so many clues that Steve is Steve and no one else.

But for now, it can wait.

***

Steve talks to him one night, after waking Tony up from a nightmare that left him covered in cold sweat, thirsty, and with his heart racing in his chest. There are tears on his face, and Tony could swear they’re tears of joy.

“I know maybe this makes me just as bad as him,” he says, and Tony thinks, _Nothing ever could_. Steve’s words, while spoken in a soft undertone, sound rehearsed, prepared, carefully chosen. It’s the first time Steve mentions the man. “But you were dreaming about doing it again. You were talking... You often seem to dream about… And I want you to know that if you want to do it, if you really want to do it, I’d be by your side. Always.”

It’s only then that Tony understands what he’s been dreaming about. What makes him happy when he wakes up. He nods against Steve’s skin.

“And it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

“How do you feel about me?”

“I’m in love with you.”

Tony closes his eyes. “Kiss me,” he asks, and Steve does.

***

“We could lose everything we’ve built, Steve. For this. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

“As long as I’m with you, I’m not losing anything.”

A beat.

“Doesn’t this go against all your morals? In theory, at least?”

“Doesn’t it go against yours?”

“I—”

“He hurt me. He’s everything I hate. But the way he hurt you… No punishment feels big enough.”

Tony goes back to stare at the blueprints.

***

They don’t pick a day.

One morning, Tony is woken up by a completely naked Steve intent on kissing his neck. He shoves Tony’s boxers down and straddles his hips.

“Is this okay?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, but you should—” Tony begins to say while his eyes still have to adjust to the brightness of the room, but he doesn’t finish his sentence when he realizes that Steve got ready while Tony was still asleep.

Oh, god.

He’s so tight and wet and hot and—

The sharp cuts framing his lower abs in a V. His flat stomach. His thighs, the muscles rippling with the way he’s riding Tony. His cock, hard and beautiful, the head almost purple with arousal. His pretty blond hair falling over his forehead when he lowers his gaze to stare into Tony’s eyes for a moment, before closing them and picking up the pace.

Oh, fuck… _Fuck_.

Steve jerks himself off and Tony watches him, and his come is warm against Tony’s skin. He bends down for a kiss and he’s still panting against Tony’s mouth when he swallows to catch his breath and says, “Tonight?”

Tony nods. “Tonight.”

***

Entering the Shadow Pillar prison is easier than Tony thought. Steve has already been here once, to talk to the man who stole his face and was a tyrant in his name, and not much has changed since then.

The fight is slightly more difficult, but Steve has the shield and a padded suit, and Tony has his armor. The man is wearing cotton.

Steve forces him down onto his knees in front of Tony. There’s a glint in the man’s eyes that speaks of mild, bored amusement, as if he expected this, saw it happen from miles away.

Tony prepares to fire.

He’s here for this. He’s dreamed about this. It’s the only thing this monster deserves, it’s the only thing that will make him breathe again.

But he can’t. At the last moment, he can’t. He doesn’t know why; he has no pity for this man. But maybe he still has some for himself. Maybe he’s just scared of what else he could justify doing if he allows himself this.

Steve lets the man go so he can be close to Tony, and that’s not a smart move, but they don’t see it yet—too much is going on.

Tony frees himself of the helmet and Steve brushes his lips against his and tells him that it’s okay. That it’s fine and he understands. That he doesn’t have to do it; that it was a bad idea to begin with. That he’d do it for him, if Tony wants him to.

They’re distracted for such a small amount of time, but it’s enough for the man to rip a metal leg from a piece of furniture bolted to the floor and throw it at Steve’s head.

Tony watches him fall, horror and something else, something that Tony has already seen there more than once, clouding Steve’s eyes before he can’t help but closing them.

***

Steve must black out just for a handful of seconds, because he’s at Tony’s side a moment later, tearing the man away from him.

It all happens in the blink of an eye.

The man manages to kick Steve away; he throws Tony to the ground and gets his hands around his neck.

Tony can only feel his bones cracking. He won’t die for lack of air; something else will kill him first.

He can’t react. The only thing he can do is watch the man’s face, red with effort and contorted with fury, and think that he’ll never be free of him.

A noise drags his attention away from the man and back to Steve.

His jaw does a thing, his shoulders twitch. He growls like a feral beast, and he throws the shield.

Tony sees what’s happening just at the right moment, at the right breath. Just in time. He thinks the right thing, moves the right way, and he fires, and the head of the man that raped him for four months and twelve days (that’s one hundred and thirty-five times, Tony thinks just now for the first time) explodes barely a second before Steve’s shield can cut it clean off the neck.

The shield hits a wall and skids across the ground. It ends up close to Tony in a clatter.

The body falls on top of Tony, and he pushes it away. He kneels on the floor, heavy and ungraceful, his lungs burning in his chest.

The blood on the shield.

Blood, brain matter. Pieces of bone.

He tries to get up but his legs are shaking and he can’t move them inside the suit. There’s blood that’s not his splattered across his face, seeping into his eyes and the undersuit; he closes his mouth and tries to breathe with his nose but he gags from the smell.

Blood. Brain. Bones.

Steve appears next to him. He drags the cowl down and Tony looks at him and wants to laugh when he sees his hair, all messed up and sweaty and standing up in spikes.

Steve wipes Tony’s face with a handkerchief and kisses him, biting his bottom lip in the process, and he tastes like freedom, and Tony swears it’s not a joke about America.

He breathes against Steve’s face, mouth open, and his heart feels like it might burst. He just killed a man and he feels euphoric; he’s never been happier in his entire life.

The happiest man on Earth is a murderer.

Tony wants to stop time; he wants to bottle up this feeling of perfection, of accomplishment, the sweetness of rightful revenge that he never thought could be so addictive, but he knows that, like it always is with all the best drugs, the rush will only last a minute.

And he thinks, _I wish my whole life was like this._ _Like this minute._

***

That night, Tony asks Steve to fuck him.

Tony expects to have to convince him; he even has a little speech prepared. But he must look ready, or sound sure, or something else he can’t quite understand himself, because Steve nods and says, “Yeah,” and he’s never sounded so thrilled and he’s never looked so rapt about anything else in all the years Tony has known him.

He might be just really fucking horny, and that’s perfectly okay with Tony—adrenaline is still streaming in his veins too, making his skin buzz. There’s a wicked spark in Steve’s eyes, a playful, lewd smirk on his lips. Tony has never wanted to be his more than right here, right now.

Tony looks up at Steve and laughs and moans his name over and over while Steve pushes into him. He starts moving and Tony’s heart leaps with joy.

He can’t keep his mouth shut. It’s a litany of _SteveSteveSteveSteve_.

Steve smiles, big and bright, and then kisses Tony and fucks him a little harder and he says, “I’m here,” and Tony says, again, “Steve.”

***

As Tony expected, nothing about it is even remotely similar to what the man used to do. Steve’s gestures, the things he says, his sighs and grunts and groans of pleasure, they’re all different. He’s a completely different person, a completely different man.

How did they not realize. How did Tony not realize.

But it’s no use to think about that now. What happened, happened, and now the man that made it happen is dead. And Steve is different, he’s completely different, and Tony is, too—he stays hard from start to finish, and his skin is on fire, and he keeps his mind present and sharp, because he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of this. Of the beauty of this.

***

After they clean up, Steve lies next to him in silence for a short while, before turning off the light to sleep.

But he doesn’t sleep. Tony hears him let out a pained whine and reaches for Steve’s hand beneath the covers.

“What—”

Steve shifts and hugs him close to himself.

“I thought… for a second there, today, I thought—” and he can’t continue or much less finish, but Tony knows. How it must have looked to Steve, entering that room, Tony being suddenly unable to do what they had been planning for weeks, Steve getting distracted, being knocked out by his nemesis who unexpectedly had a weapon.

Maybe Steve, too, has something he thinks about once a day, every day.

They sleep, and the next morning Tony travels down Steve’s body and blows him.

“As a belated apology,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Steve laughs and tells him that he loves him.

This time, Tony says it back.

***

There are no real consequences for what they did.

The man was a thorn in the side of pretty much anyone who was supposed to deal with him. The Shadow Pillar is a black site prison, miles and miles off any American soil. It’s not the first time that one of its inmates—international terrorists, dictators, people accused of genocide and crimes against humanity—gets killed in a dubious way, and it’s not the first time that such an event is swept under the rug without much thought.

The trial alone was going to be a nightmare for everyone involved, so it’s better like this. One less problem to solve. The man is dead, and barely anyone gets to even know about it, so he never becomes a martyr for the leftover Hydra loyalists. No one complains about the unclear circumstances of his death.

Tony destroys all the footage anyway.

There’s not an ounce of regret in his soul.

***

Months pass, then a year, then two. They avoid the end of the world three times. The team changes: sometimes someone leaves, sometimes there’s someone new, but Steve and Tony simply stay.

Even though the man is dead, Tony still thinks about what he did to him once a day, every day. But now, he thinks he gets what the poem really meant.

The memory will never go away, so you can’t try and make it disappear, because it’s impossible. It happened, and you have to bear those scars whether you like them or not. The only thing you can do is allow yourself to think about it once a day, every day. But _only_ once a day. That’s the secret, the whole point. Don’t let the memory take over your mind. Don’t try to repress it completely either, because it will never work. Instead, let it come out of that hidden corner of your soul for just enough time to keep it at bay. But never a moment more.

So Tony does it. He thinks about it every day, but only once a day.

Sometimes he’d stop in his tracks for a second, lost in thought, and Steve would turn around, touch his hand, and ask, “What are you thinking about?” and Tony would meet his gaze and say, “Nothing,” and it would be the truth, because while the question was asked and the answer was given, the moment for thinking about it—about what the man did to him once a day every day for four months and twelve days—is already gone.

**Author's Note:**

> While it is canon that T’Challa reads poetry, the book he gives Tony doesn’t exist, just like the poem I ~quoted. The words are mine. That’s why it’s an awful poem, but it served the story
> 
> There are some lines I took from Avengers vol. 5 #1 and some references to Secret Empire Omega (regarding the facility where Hydra Cap is kept). 
> 
> _Dune_ really is one of Kamala's favorite books.
> 
> Last thing: the Avengers Mountain thing is a spoiler for Avengers vol. 8 #8. I don’t really know what it means exactly so I made up something unoriginal, and assumed there will be bedrooms for the Avengers, a kitchen, a library, a lab, a gym. Maybe it will be jossed in more than one way once the issue comes out but for now just roll with it. Except for this, the fic isn’t super compliant with what has happened in the book so far.
> 
> On [Tumblr](http://silkspectred.tumblr.com/post/176847277895/once-a-day-every-day-silkspectred-8k-e)  
> On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/silkspectred/status/1027963714174103553)


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